I'm not yet 60 years old, which means I am outside the target market for The Hundred-Foot Journey, a The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel wannabe starring Helen Mirren and an Indian family about food, rivalries, romances and other things that as a whole don't work very well together.

Om Puri and Manish Dayal star as the owner of a new Indian restaurant in a quaint French town and his son, a brilliant chef, respectively, who find themselves on the receiving end of shocking hostilities by Madame Mallory (Mirren), the owner of a Michelen-starred establish across the street. The two sides' battles escalate… that is, until cooler heads prevail and the rest of the movie happens, where it proceeds to get progressively less interesting by the minute.

The movie has its moments, and most of them happen early on. The dynamics between the displaced Indian family are quite good, the actors having terrific chemistry with one another. The war between the family and Mallory is also entertaining, and while woefully underdeveloped and suffering from the fact that the two don't have great chemistry together, the budding relationship between Hassan (Dayal) and Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon) is cute. For a while.

But The Hundred-Foot Journey is a movie that doesn't know what it's supposed to be. Is it a drama? A comedy? A romance? A movie about food? About overcoming differences? About one man's quest to become an expert chef?

It tries to be all those things and doing so fails across the board.

Once the war fades away and everyone becomes friends (sorry, spoiler!), The Hundred-Foot Journey fizzles like some food pun I'm too lazy to come up with. Director Lasse Hallström (Chocolat) and screenwriter Steven Knight (Locke), working from a book by Richard C. Morais, take the movie in a hundred different directions, none of them developed nor interesting enough to hold your attention.

The second half of the movie attempts to focus on Hassan's rise as a celebrated chef, but by doing so the film betrays what made it somewhat compelling in the first place. As soon as he moves to Paris the movie might have well ended; at this point, its entertainment value plummets to zero.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is not without some redeeming value, but a scattered story, inconsistent tone and generally lackluster entertainment value keep this from being anymore than a fried appetizer from Applebee's. There's my food pun. This movie review is over.

Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.